“That’s different… Go to sleep now.”
Not till the following morning was Livia told that her father was dead;
and this was not true.
She had been a baby at the time of her father’s trial and
sentence, so
that the problem of how much to tell her, and how to explain his absence or
her mother’s distress, had not immediately arisen. The year had been the last
one of the nineteenth century or the first of the twentieth (according to
taste and argument); events in South Africa had gone badly, and men were
being recruited for the least romantic, though by its supporters and
contemporaries the most romanticized, of all England’s wars. Emily Channing,
who was a romanticist about that and everything else, concocted a dream in
which her husband obtained his release to enlist, and eventually, on kop or
veldt, ‘made good’ by some extraordinary act of gallantry which would earn
him the King’s pardon and possibly a V.C. as well. It was an absurd idea, for
British justice is unsentimental to the point of irony, preferring to keep
the criminal fed, clothed, and housed in perfect safety at the country’s
expense, while the non- criminals risk and lose their lives on foreign
fields. Channing knew this, and was not in the least surprised when the
appeal his wife had persuaded him to make was turned down. But Emily was
heartbroken, the more so as she had already told Livia that her father was
‘at the war’. It was a simple explanation in tune with the spirit of the
times; Emily had found no difficulty in giving it, but Livia was really too
young to know what or where ‘the war’ was, and only gradually absorbed her
father’s absence into a private imagery of her own.
A couple of years later, however, the South African War was history, and
there came that grey October day in 1903 when even a prison-interview between
husband and wife could not avoid discussion of the matter. For John Channing,
after several years to think things over, was in a somewhat changed mood.
Till then Emily and he had always comforted each other with talk of her
waiting for him and the ultimate joys of reunion; but now, during the
half-hour that was all they were allowed once a month, he suddenly told her
they must both face facts. And the facts, he pointed out, were that with the
utmost remission of sentence for good conduct he would not be released until
1913, by which time he would be fifty, she would be thirty-eight, and Livia
fourteen.
But Emily (as before remarked) was a romanticist, and the interview was
distressing in a way that no earlier one had been. Sincerely loving her
husband, she could accept only two attitudes as proof of his continued love
for her: that he should, as heretofore, expect her to wait for him, or that
he should melodramatically beg her to ‘try to forget’ him. And now, in this
changed mood, he was doing neither. He was merely advising her that she
should live her life realistically, feel free to make any association
elsewhere that might at any time promise happiness, and forget him without
feeling guilty if that should seem the easiest thing to do. If, on the other
hand, this did not happen, and at the end of the long interval they both felt
they could resume their lives together, then that would clearly be an
experiment to be attempted. As for Livia, the suggestion he made was equally
realistic—that the child should be told the plain truth as soon as she
was old enough to understand it. “Why not? You certainly won’t be able to
carry on with the war story now that there isn’t a war.”
“I could tell her you were abroad,” Emily suggested, “doing some important
work. Or I could say you were an explorer… And perhaps there WILL be
another war somewhere soon.”
John Channing smiled—and his smile, Emily felt, was also different
from usual. It was a slanting, uncomfortable smile, and it lasted a long time
before he answered: “No, Emily—just tell her the truth. Of course
you’ll have to be judge of the right moment, but there’s really no way out of
telling her, once she begins to have school friends. And it would be far
better for her to learn the facts from you than to pick them up in garbled
scraps from other children.”
“I shall tell her you’re innocent, of course.”
The smile recurred. “Oh no, NO, Emily—don’t ever do that. First,
because I’m not, and second, because it would give her a grudge to go through
life with—the worst possible thing for a youngster. Say that I’m guilty
of what I’m here for, but you can add, if you like, that I’m not personally a
vile character… That is, if you agree that I’m not.”
“Wouldn’t that be very hard for her to understand at her age?”
“At any age, Emily. Sometimes even I find it hard to grasp. But I’d rather
have her puzzled about me than indignant on my behalf.”
But Emily, distressed as she was, nevertheless declined to accept that
alternative herself. To be puzzled was the one thing she abhorred, and to
avoid it she could almost always discover a romantic formula. That accounted
for her mood when, towards twilight as she returned home after the interview,
she saw Livia wandering in the road below the clough; it was why she failed
to scold her, or to listen to her prattle about ghosts; and it was why, next
morning, after long consultations with Sarah and Miss Fortescue, she told
Livia the only possible romantic lie about her father except that he was
innocent; and that was, that he was dead. He had been killed, she said, in
South Africa, and the war for which he had given his life had ended in
victory. Emily found it possible to say all this convincingly, with genuine
tears, and without going into awkward details. Doubtless in a few years (she
reckoned) the truth would have to come out, but when it did it might even
seem relatively GOOD news to a child of maturer intelligence; while for the
time being it surely could not upset Livia too much to think that a father
whom she did not remember had died a hero. Pride more than grief seemed the
likely emotion.
Livia felt neither, however, so much as a queer kind of relief. She wept
easily when her mother wept, for much the same reason that she made imitative
noises when the dog barked or the cat mewed; but she had stared out of the
drawing-room window with such protracted hopes of her father’s return that it
was almost pleasanter not to have to expect him any more. Instead, she
promptly added a new legend to that of the three little girls whose ghosts
were supposed to haunt the neighbourhood. She persisted in telling people
(the people at Stoneclough, for she never met anyone else) that she often saw
her father’s ghost in the clough, smoking and walking slowly and looking at
the trees. She was so circumstantial in describing all this that Miss
Fortescue grew nervous about driving to Browdley after dark, though there
were several flaws in Livia’s story when Miss Fortescue analysed it. For
instance, how could Livia, who did not remember her father, even pretend to
recognize his ghost? And then, too, the detail about the smoking. Not only
had John Channing been a non-smoker, but Miss Fortescue was also sure that
ghosts could not smoke. Livia, however, replied stoutly: “My daddy’s ghost
DOES.”
Which presented a problem that Emily, Miss Fortescue, Sarah, Dr. Whiteside
(the family physician), and a few others were wholly unable to evaluate, much
less to solve. Could it be that the child, in addition to BELIEVING a lie
(which was only right and proper, in the circumstances), was also capable of
TELLING one? Miss Fortescue thought not, again adducing the ‘smoking’ detail.
If Livia had uttered a falsehood with deliberate intent to deceive, surely
she would not have invented such an incongruity; therefore, did it not prove
that she was speaking what at least she regarded as the truth?
In fact, it was neither a lie nor the truth, but some halfway vision in a
child’s-eye view of the world, a vision that could start as easily from a lie
deliberately told, and as easily end by sincerely believing it. Those three
children, for instance; Livia had undoubtedly lied in claiming to have seen
them, but later her fancy convinced her that she DID see them, more than
once; and this made her forget that she had lied in the first place. Nor was
it ever a conscious lie that she saw her father, for by that time the clough
was a place where she could see anything and anybody. The high trees arching
over the stream as it tumbled from the moorland, the ruins of the old
cottages where grass grew through the cracks of the hearthstones, the winding
path leading down from the Stoneclough garden to the road—these were
the limits of a world that did not exist elsewhere save in Grimm and Hans
Andersen and the Tanglewood Tales—a world as young as the children who
lived in it and the belief that alone made it real.
And in the other world, meanwhile, she continued to learn Mathematics,
Spelling, Geography, History and ‘Scripture’ from Miss Fortescue, who was
everlastingly thrilled by the secret that could not yet be told and by her
own forbearance in not telling it; she also understood children just enough
to feel quite certain that she understood Livia completely, which she never
did. Old Sarah, who professed no subtleties, came much closer when she
remarked, leaning over the child’s first attempts at arithmetic— “Queer
stuff they put into your head, Livia—no wonder you see ghosts after
it.” And it was Sarah who saw nothing queer at all in Livia’s question, when
Miss Fortescue had informed her that Ben Nevis was the highest mountain in
the United Kingdom: “Please, Miss Fortescue, what’s the LOWEST?”
Another war did begin, as Emily had envisaged (but it was
between Russia
and Japan, and so not one in which an English household had to take sides);
meanwhile Livia passed her sixth birthday; meanwhile also the cotton trade
boomed and then slumped. This would have mattered more at Stoneclough had not
Emily possessed a little money of her own; indeed, it was a subject of bitter
comment throughout Browdley, where hundreds had been ruined as a result of
the Channing crash, that the family responsible for it seemed to be
flourishing just as formerly. But this was not quite accurate. Browdley did
not realize how much had been abandoned—the town house in London, the
holidays at Marienbad, the platoon of servants; and while to Browdley life at
Stoneclough was itself a luxury, to Emily it was an economy enforced by the
fact that the house was of a size and style that made it practically
unsaleable, and thus cheaper to stay in than to give up. So they stayed
—she and Livia and Miss Fortescue and Watson the gardener-coachman-
handyman (a truly skeleton staff for such an establishment); and the blacker
the looks of Browdley people, as trade worsened and times became harder, the
more advantageous it seemed that Stoneclough was so remote although so close
—a moorland fastness that no one from the town need approach save in
the mood and on the occasions of holidays. All of which, in its own way,
conditioned Livia’s childhood. Sundays in summer-time were the days when she
must, above all things, remain within the half-mile of garden fence;
week-days in winter-time permitted her the greatest amount of freedom. It was
easy, by this means, to keep her ignorant of everything except Miss
Fortescue’s teachings and a general impression that all nature was kind and
all humanity to be avoided.
And Emily, who liked to put things off anyway, kept putting off the time
for correcting all this. “Next year perhaps,” she would say, whenever Dr.
Whiteside mentioned the matter. He was an old man who had brought both Livia
and Livia’s father into the world; he did not greatly care for Emily and
doubted the wisdom of most things that she did. “It’s time the child went to
school and mixed with people,” he kept urging. “Why don’t you tell her the
truth and get it over? You’ll have her self-centred and neurotic if she stays
here seeing nobody but you and Sarah and Miss Fortescue… What does John
think about it?”
“He left it to me to tell her when I think the moment is right,” replied
Emily, with strained accuracy. “She’s only eight, remember.”
But it was just the same when Emily was able to say “She’s only nine” and
“She’s only ten”. And by that time also another thing had happened. John had
been transferred to a prison in the south of England, and Emily no longer saw
him every month. After all, it was a long journey just for the sake of one
short interview, and it was possible also to wonder what good it did, either
to him or her; letters were much easier.
Not that Emily was a hard-hearted woman—far from it. She had no
bitterness against her husband for either the crash or the crime, or even
against the country for having jailed him; she had no conviction that he
deserved his punishment—nor, on the other hand, that he had been
monstrously over-punished. The whole situation was one she could no longer
come to terms with at all, since it had passed the stage of romantic
interpretation. She was still able to weep whenever she thought of him, but
equally able to go without thinking of him for long periods, and the idea of
raking the whole thing up by telling Livia was not only distasteful, but
something she was a little scared of. Already she was aware of something in
Livia—character or personality or whatever one called it—that
outclassed her own. For one thing, Livia had no fear—of ghosts, or
being alone, or anything else. And also she would sometimes make scenes
—curious, nerve-racking scenes that made Emily feel peculiarly
helpless. Perhaps Dr. Whiteside was right and the child WAS neurotic—
but would the knowledge that her father was in prison make her any less so?
It was easy to think not.
Nor was it clear that Livia would be made happier by school, for in
addition to hating the idea of it, the child also seemed perfectly happy at
Stoneclough. She had far more freedom than children have in many homes; she
could play with dogs, cats, chickens, tame rabbits, and William the horse;
she liked and was permitted to make cooking experiments in the kitchen and
planting experiments in the garden; she could walk endlessly over near-by
moorland and through the clough on week-days; she could read library books
sent up from Mudie’s in London, and there was that new invention, the
phonograph, to amuse her. And on Sundays, to brighten the one day of
restriction, old Mr. Felsby usually called. But it did not brighten things so
much for Livia, who early formed the opinion that Mr. Felsby was a bore.